Profiles

Abdul Ila in Melah, Yemen

"It's a very cosmopolitan city," is how Tim describes Bradford. "You can almost travel the world on the city circular bus. I've always taken an interest in the different communities in Bradford, with their origins in different parts of the world. For many years, I centred the work I did with them actually in the city, then it kind of expanded to doing work in other towns and cities with similar communities. Then I also started going to the places where these communities had come from - whether it be Pakistan or India, the Ukraine or wherever, just to look at the other end of the story. Bradford's been a kind of springboard, if you like. These local projects I've done in Bradford have been a springboard for doing these national or international projects which generally result in an exhibition or a book."

The old city of Sana'a, Yemen

This perhaps explains a lot about Tim Smith's wanderlust - a need to make connections between people and places whether they be just down the road in Bradford, or even halfway round the world. And, with his trusty camera slung round his neck wherever he goes, he's made it his job to record these connections. In many ways, with his photographs of disparate communities both here and abroad, he proves the old cliche that it's a small world.

This time round, it's Yemen which is the focus for Tim's lens - appropriately enough the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East and Asia and one of the places which laid the foundations of Britain's Muslim community. In his new book Coal, Frankincense and Myrrh - Yemen and British Yemenis, he travels from Bradford to capture scenes in modern Yemen, a country which many families have left behind to start new lives here in Britain in, for instance, the Merchant Navy or the steel industry. Tim explains why this place captured his imagination so much: "I thought it was important to show that Yemen has been this kind of crossroads of all these different places for thousands of years but it also helped visually because I didn't just want to take lots of photographs of former sailors and steelworkers because then it would have been an exhibition of mainly old men staring out of windows or what-have-you...It's a fantastic and extraordinary place to go."

For Tim, his Yemeni project is another chance to trace people's origins in pictures. He feels that these images - whether taken in the Middle East or in West Yorkshire - can help make connections: "One thing is that there's so much stuff written and talked about in the media and all over the place about places like Bradford and immigration and multicultural-this and multiethnic-that. But, take the Pakistani community, for example. There's very little understanding outside that community itself about why they came, how they came, where they came from and all that background story. People in Bradford know that the first Pakistanis came to Bradford to work in textiles and that they're from Pakistan, but they don't know why they're from particular places like Mirpur, Attock or the Northwest Frontier...I think that telling these stories is personally interesting and the communities themselves usually welcome it because it's something about them and their homeland which they often have quite a strong connection with, whether they were born over there or over here. Hopefully it's of value for the wider community as well because it puts those communities in context and is wasn't just that they magically turned up here one year because there were jobs going in textiles."

Shopping for a wedding dress in Sana'a

Again, says Tim, it's all about making those links between communities: "It's about the history of the British Empire and the history of the First World War and the Second World War, the Partition of India and Pakistan and all those trade and military links that go back centuries which are really the reason why there are people from Kashmir here. Seventy five percent of Pakistanis in the UK are from an area of southern Kashmir called Mirpur and there are very good reasons for that. Again, the Poles or the Ukrainians, and the old Polish communities that came after the Second World War didn't come here by accident...They've got extraordinary stories of what happened to them during World War Two and I think those stories are worth telling."

Of course, Tim's photography isn't all about flitting from one location to another when he wants, he also has to do what he calls "the sort of work that pays the bills". Having worked on commissions for publications such as the Guardian, Independent, Observer and the Times, he's certainly put in the legwork - or should that be the lenswork? - but he now finds himself with more chances to work to his own brief on things like Coal, Frankincense and Myrrh. He says this comes as a bit of a relief: "When you're in your twenties and thirties, for example, when I worked for a news agency, it was quite exciting getting up and not knowing where you were going to be that day and dashing about and doing pictures on very tight deadlines that would be in the 'paper the next day. But after doing that for a decade it does get pretty exhausting...So I do less of the hard news journalism but hopefully more of these long-term projects."

Old Marib, home of the Queen of Sheba

Tim's clearly come a long way - literally, taking into account the miles he must have travelled over the past few years on his photographic journeys - since he began studying photography in South Wales. But even back at the start, for Tim it was all about telling stories through the camera lens: "When I was in Newport I did a project on the docklands area where I lived - a very cosmopolitan place near the docks where people had come from all over the world to South Wales. Many of them still lived in the docks area...I looked at these different communities with their origins all over the world. That's what interested me about Bradford, in a way."

Even with Coal, Frankincense and Myrrh hot off the presses, Tim Smith's already got his eye on the future - it's next stop the West Indies! It's a logical choice for him as he spent some of his childhood there while his father worked for the British government overseas: "The West Indies is this place I have a personal link to, so I'd like to go back and perhaps take some pictures there."

Tim Smith: Have camera, will travel

But, wherever he finds himself and his camera, it's clear that he's found a home in Bradford - a place that he says has given him many chances he might otherwise have missed: "It's given me the opportunity to go to all these different places. Photographers, or any kind of journalist really, don't just turn up in a country not speaking the language and just set off to do something. For me, it just doesn't work. The great thing about living in Bradford is that with the kind of places I'm interested in going to, you can find somebody in Bradford you can do your research with and with whom you can put together the logistics you need to make working over there possible. You don't just walk around with a camera thinking 'Ooh, that looks nice!' Some work like that if they're just taking travelogue-type stuff but, if you want to get behind the scenes and get involved with ordinary people's lives, then you need to do your research and get things set up. Bradford is a great place to do that!"

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS ON THIS PAGE © TIM SMITH. REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION.

Tim Smith's Coal, Frankincense and Myrrh - Yemen and British Yemenis is published by Dewi Lewis Publishing